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circumstances. There seemed to be no shortage of circumstances to blame: weakened, chaotic or broken
families, ineffective schools, antisocial gangs, racism, poverty, unemployment. Criminologists took
seriously, more so than many other students of social behavior, the famous dictum of the French sociologist
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Emile Durkheim: Social facts must have social explanations. The sociological theory of crime had the
unquestioned support of prominent editorialists, commentators, politicians and most thoughtful people.
2 Today, many learned journals and scholarly works draw a different picture. Sociological factors have
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not been abandoned, but increasingly it is becoming clear to many scholars that crime is the outcome of an
interaction between social factors and certain biological factors, particularly for the offenders who, by
repeated crimes, have made public places dangerous. The idea is still controversial, but increasingly, to the
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old question «Are criminals bom or made?» the answer seems to be: both. The causes of crime lie in a
combination of predisposing biological traits channeled by social circumstance into criminal behavior. The
traits alone do not inevitably lead to crime; the circumstances do not make criminals of everyone; but
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together they create a population responsible for a large fraction of America's problem of crime in the
streets.
3 Evidence that criminal behavior has deeper roots than social circumstances has always been right at
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hand, but social science has, until recent years, overlooked its implications. As far as the records show,
crime everywhere and throughout history is disproportionately a young man's pursuit. Whether men are 20
or more times as likely to be arrested as women, as is the case in Malawi or Bmnei, or only four to six
35
times as likely, as in the United States or France, the sex difference in crime statistics is universal.
Similarly, 18-year-olds may sometimes be four times as likely to be criminal as 40-year-olds, while at
other times only twice as likely. In the United States, more than half of all arrests for seriously property
40
crimes are of 20-year-olds or younger. Nowhere have older persons been as criminal as younger ones.
4 It is easy to imagine purely social explanations for the effects of age and sex on crime. Boys in many
societies are trained by their parents and the society itself to play more roughly and aggressively than girls.
45 Boys are expected to fight back, not to cry, and to play to win. Likewise, boys in many cultures are denied
adult responsibilities, kept in a state of prolonged dependence and confined too long in schools that many
of them find unrewarding. For a long time, these factors were thought to be the whole story.
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5 Ultimately, however, the very universality of the age and sex differences in crime have alerted some
social scientists to the implausibility of a theory that does not look beyond the accidents of particular
societies. If cultures as different as Japan's and Sweden's, England's and Mexico's, have sex and age
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differences in crime, then perhaps we should have suspected from the start that there was something more
fundamental going on than parents happening to decide to raise their boys and girls differently. What is it
about boys, girls and their parents, in societies of all sorts, that leads them to emphasize, rather than
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overcome, sex differences? Moreover, even if we believed that every society has arbitrarily decided to
inculcate aggressiveness in males, there would still be the greater criminality among young males to
explain. After all, in some cultures, young boys are not denied adult responsibilities but are kept out of
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school, put to work tilling the land and made to accept obligations to the society.
6
But it is no longer necessary to approach questions about the sources of criminal behavior merely
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with argument and supposition. There is evidence. Much crime, it is agreed, has an aggressive component,
and Eleanor Emmons Maccoby, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, and Carol Nagy Jacklin,
a psychologist now at the University of Southern California, after reviewing the evidence on sex
75 differences in aggression, concluded that it has a foundation that is at least in part biological. Only that
conclusion can be drawn, they said, from data that show that the average man is more aggressive than the
average woman in all known societies, that the sex difference is present in infancy well before evidence of
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sex-role socialization by adults, that similar sex differences turn up in many of our biological relatives —
monkeys and apes. Human aggression has been directly tied to sex hormones, particularly male sex
hormones, in experiments on athletes engaging in competitive sports and on prisoners known for violent or
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domineering behavior. No single line of evidence is decisive and each can be challenged, but all together
they convinced Drs. Maccoby and Jacklin, as well as most specialists on the biology of sex differences,
that the sexual conventions that assign males the aggressive roles have biological roots.
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7 That is also the conclusion of most researchers about the developmental forces that make adolescence
and young adulthood a time of risk for criminal and other nonconventional behavior. This is when
powerful new drives awaken, leading to frustrations that foster behavior unchecked by the internalized
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prohibitions of adulthood. The result is usually just youthful rowdiness, but, in a minority of cases it passes
over the line into crime.